EL PASO -- The city is facing a child care crunch as thousands of soldiers are relocated to Fort Bliss and those serving overseas come home to start families.
"We are seeing more demand, especially with infants," said Ana Coleman, the local Armed Services YMCA director for child care development. "Two-year olds, they sometimes get a waiting list, but not as often as the infants."
About 95 percent of the center's children are from military families.
Fort Bliss currently has about 20,000 soldiers and is expected to grow to about 34,000 by 2013. Formulas used by the Army to estimate the number of school-age children indicate the expansion will add more than 3,000 children to kindergarten through fifth-grade classrooms, but that doesn't include projections for infants and toddlers.
Beaumont Army Medical Center officials have said they expect mini baby booms about nine months after units return from overseas deployments. Soldiers relocating to Fort Bliss are mostly with the 1st Armored Division, a combat arms unit. The deployment cycles are not expected to slow in the foreseeable future.
The post, which currently can provide child care for about 860 children, is in the process of building nearly $68 million worth of youth centers, said spokeswoman Jean Offutt. The construction, which will add about 1,550 child care slots, will not be finished until 2011. The first two of a total of nine new centers are scheduled to open in December.
But there are obstacles to creating more capacity in the city's private child care centers because of the cost involved in meeting federal standards.
The Armed Services YMCA's center, a private center located off post, always stays near its 136-child capacity, Coleman said.
Soldiers can qualify for up to $100 a month for child care, she said. The money is sent directly to the child care facilities, which must meet the federal standards, she added. The standards include a maximum number of children per child care worker and educational requirements for those workers.
El Paso has more than 500 child care centers and homes in El Paso that receive regular state inspections. But Coleman said only 18 of them are on her referral list. Those are the centers that meet the standards and offer the kinds of programs her clients want.
One of those is Children's Kingdom at 3210 Dyer. About 70 percent of the center's children come from military families.
Children's Kingdom has remained at or near its 110-child capacity since shortly after it opened in 2004, said center director Aida Clark. It does little advertising, instead relying on word of mouth, she said.
"We have seen an increase in the military families coming in," she said. "We do have a waiting list for certain classrooms -- infants in particular."
One of the reasons El Paso has a shortage of infant care is that the federal requirements are particularly strict in that age range, requiring more staff per child, she said. That makes the care more costly to provide. However, even for older children, the requirements used by the military are more strict than the state's, she added.
Staff members who get the required education also expect raises the centers cannot afford, she said.
"Right now we are talking about expanding," Clark said. "But it takes a lot of money to do that."
The center will have to decide whether it wants to raise its tuition fees, she said, which would turn away some parents. And the private child care centers have a hard time competing with those on post because they are built and staffed with government funding, she said.
According to information provided by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, the number of centers and homes in El Paso receiving regular inspections has decreased slightly from 592 in 2005 to 526 in 2008.Through August, there have been 43 applications for new child care businesses, said Paul Zimmerman, a department spokesman for the El Paso region.
That could be bad news for all parents in El Paso. Many families have two working parents. The demands on military parents can be particularly severe.